winmail.dat attachments problem

[Marco Thompson]

I am a new mac user, grew up on PC. I installed entourage. When some people send me .vcf contact email attachmentss, they show up on my system as an attachment called winmail.dat.

I've been reading everywhere on the web, and there may be a simple way to fix this on the sender's side... something about rich text format options in outlook... (rtf)

A friend who is on mac does not have this problem, so I've got to believe that there is a setting on my mac or in entourage that can fix this....

[symphonix]

Its the people who are *sending* you the email who need to disable the "Send HTML emails to this user" option in their version of Outlook. Winmail.dat files are *only* created by Outlook and Outlook Express - and they can only be read by those two programs! Way to go, Microsoft.

[Giaguara]

More about winmail.dat : http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304245

The attachment means the email was sent from a Microsoft email application (such as Outlook and the Microsoft Exchange Client) and includes rich text information--how fonts, colors and specialized attributes such as underlining or boldface should appear in the email (the attachment doesn't appear in Outlook but does appear in Mail; it may appear in other email applications as a MIME section named "application/ms-tnef").

Avoiding these attachments

To avoid seeing these attachments in the future, you ask the sender to deselect the email's "Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format" checkbox or preference setting in mail client before they send the message. And howto do that on Microsoft site : http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q241538

[MisterMe]

There are two utilities which will decode winmail.dat files. One is freeware TNEF's Enough; the other is shareware Mail plug-in OMiC.